POWERFUL SERVICE PROVIDER SOLUTIONS

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Overview

Foundry offers a wide range of high performance routing and switching products that allow service providers to build scalable, cost efficient infrastructures that address their current as well as future needs. A rich product portfolio spanning edge to core devices with a variety of high speed interface options allows the creation of end-to-end solutions based on Foundry products. In addition, a comprehensive and mature set of routing and switching protocols and features, complemented by best of breed resiliency features incorporated in Multi-Service IronWare® operating system allows service providers to achieve their goals of high capacity, high performance, high availability, and cost efficiency.

Metro and Carrier Ethernet Service Providers

MPLS Core PB or PBB Ring 1GE MPLS Access Ring NI XMR 4000 Multi-10GE Core NI MLX-8 (PE) NI XMR 8000 (PE) NI XMR 16000 (P) Internet MAN 2 MAN 1 NI M2404 NI CES 2000 OC-12/48/192 NI XMR 4000 (Gateway) NI XMR (BGP Peering) BI RX-4 (MTU) NI CES 2000 (MTU) FESX424 (MTU) NI CES 2000 L2 MRP Ring FESX424HF FESX424HF BI RX-4

From the simple Layer 2 metro designs to the more sophisticated MPLS-based designs, Foundry offers robust, highly scalable solutions that enable the creation of cost efficient, high performance MANs.

For simple, cost efficient layer 2 metro designs, the high performance layer 2 switching capabilities built into all Foundry products enable the creation of high capacity infrastructures with end-to-end wire-speed performance and QoS. This is complemented by a unique feature set of advanced layer 2 protocols for fast, sub-second convergence: IEEE 802.1w, Metro Ring Protocol (MRP), Virtual Switch Redundancy Protocol (VSRP). In addition, Foundry’s switches are unique in their ability to enforce L2 and L3 Access Control Lists (ACLs) in a switched environment allowing metro providers to enforce policies that were traditionally achievable only using layer 3 solutions.

Typical candidates for the creation of such layer 2 metros are the FastIron Edge Switch (FES), FastIron Edge X-Series (FESX), the NetIron CES 2000 and the BigIron RX-4. In addition, such a

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solution can be augmented through the deployment of the NetIron MLX Series products to add high touch features like strong policy enforcement via inbound and outbound ACLs, advanced accounting, and scalable traffic policing. Foundry’s NetIron XMR Series routers, NetIron MLX Series routers and NetIron CES 2000 Series switches are built for compliance with MEF 9 and MEF 14 specifications.

Foundry’s NetIron CES 2000 Series allows advanced Layer 2 technologies such as IEEE 802.1ah Provider Backbone Bridging (PBB) or IEEE 802.1ad Provider Bridging (PB) to be used to extend Carrier Ethernet services to the edge of a network. Additionally, Foundry’s innovative Metro Ring Protocol (MRP and MRP-II) have been extended to provide resiliency in rings that implement PBB or PB technologies.

Foundry’s BigIron RX Layer 3 switches, NetIron CES 2000 switches, NetIron MLX switching routers, and the NetIron XMR core routers all support the ability to flood unknown unicast traffic and broadcast traffic in hardware. In large Layer 2 networks, such traffic can be used as a Trojan horse to attack the management plane of the switch/router. Unlike legacy systems that handle such traffic in software by a management processor, these Foundry devices can handle the traffic completely in hardware.

Up to approximately 4094 VLANs can be supported by such a solution with the capability of doing VLAN ID translation for provisioning flexibility. The solution also scales to 1 – 2 Million MAC addresses1 _{in the core with the ability to control MAC address learning at the edge to provide} security and scalability.

For metro providers aiming for higher scalability services, or looking forward to deploying inter-metro services, Foundry’s MPLS capable products provide ideal platforms for deploying high scalability and cost efficient services. Playing a central role in such scenarios are the NetIron MLX Series routers for high capacity metro services at the edge/aggregation layers, and the NetIron XMR Series routers for high scalability core and inter-Metro connectivity. For extending MPLS into the last mile, the NetIron M2404 metro access switches provide a compact (1 RU), cost effective solution for offering scalable, resilient MPLS-based L-2 services to the end subscriber. This carefully designed mix of form factors allows metro providers to deploy the right amount of ports they need at any given location in order to build a cost efficient end-to-end MPLS network.

Foundry’s total MPLS solution for metro providers includes MPLS link speeds spanning 10Mbps Ethernet to 10-GbE, and OC-12, -48, and -192 for POS. Advanced MPLS traffic engineering (via OSPF-TE, IS-IS/TE, RSVP-TE, CSPF) is supported on Foundry’s MPLS routers to provide metro providers with a higher degree of control over their resource utilization, enable service differentiation, and offer stringent Service Level Agreements (SLA) to their end subscribers. For metro providers interested in simplifying their transport while focusing on high value VPN services, Foundry’s LDP LSP support addresses this need.

All three types of popular VPN services can be supported using Foundry’s MPLS routers allowing providers to turn on services as required based on market demand, and even multiplexing more than one type of service on the same access line to the subscriber. For VPNs, Foundry supports the following layer 2 and layer 3 services:

• Virtual Leased Line (VLL) – for point to point layer 2 services similar to frame relay or leased lines. The VLL service is also known as Pseudo-Wire Emulation service.

• Virtual Private LAN Service (VPLS) – for multipoint layer 2 services • BGP/MPLS VPNs (RFC 2547bis) – for multipoint layer 3 VPN services

Metro providers can leverage the superior traffic policing and QoS capabilities of the NetIron MLX and XMR routers, and the NetIron M2404 switches to deliver new types of SLAs to their target

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market(s) allowing them to compete with traditional ATM and Frame Relay offerings. Traffic policing is based on state of the art Two Rate Three Color Marker algorithm, complemented by a choice of multiple QoS profiles in order to offer metro providers unprecedented flexibility in defining Service Level Specifications, and consequently, the ability to differentiate themselves from their competitors.

To further optimize CapEx, Foundry’s MPLS routers are designed to integrate well with layer 2 access layers or layer 2 metros. Foundry’s MPLS routers feature wire speed layer 2 switching, in addition to flexible VLAN to MPLS VPN service mapping with VLAN ID translation for scalable and flexible provisioning. This allows metro providers to reap the cost benefits of building the access layer using inexpensive layer 2 switches, or seamlessly interconnect their existing layer 2 metros without costly infrastructure-wide upgrades. By combining VPLS in the backbone / aggregation layers using NetIron XMR or MLX routers with PBB or PB technologies in the access layer using NetIron CES 2000 switches, highly scalable Carrier Ethernet services can be delivered.

To simplify the provisioning of Ethernet and IP/MPLS networks, Foundry Networks has partnered with Oracle, the industry’s #1 provider of service activation products. Using Oracle Communications IP Service Activator (IPSA) platform, service providers can rapidly provision end-to-end services on a next-generation infrastructure that is built using Foundry’s high-performance products with minimal errors, thereby accelerating the time to revenue for such services.

IPv4/IPv6 Internet Routing

Core Edge Internet Distribution 1GE Ring 10GE Ring NI XMR 16000 FES X FES FI SX 800 OC-12/48 DSLAM NI MLX-4 FE/GE FES X424HF NI CES 2000 NI XMR 8000 NI MLX-4 NI XMR (BGP Peering) NI MLX-4 NI MLX-4 10GE/OC-192

Foundry offers a complete range of routing products ranging from entry level stackables like the FastIron Edge Switch – with Layer 3 upgrade – to the high end, high performance routers like the NetIron MLX routers and the NetIron XMR routers.

A complete set of IPv4 unicast and multicast routing protocols enables support for a multitude of high performance routing scenarios. These protocols include RIP, OSPF, BGP, IS-IS, IGMP, DVMRP, PIM-DM, and PIM-SM.

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Featuring industry leading scalability, Foundry’s routers offer massive BGP route capacity up to 10 Million routes – in the BGP RIB – and 2000 BGP peers on the NetIron XMR routers. The huge route capacity is complemented by super fast route processors – on the management modules – and fast Forwarding Information Base (FIB) table download to the interface modules to allow for fast route table calculation and path recovery in case of a network failure.

Radical changes in Internet traffic patterns caused by the rise of peer to peer applications, Internet worms, and various types of malware have necessitated the use of completely hardware driven, robust, high end routing techniques in the core and distribution layers of an ISP network. Foundry Direct Routing (FDR) effectively addresses this crucial ISP need providing complete Forwarding Information Base programming in the interface module hardware to offer consistent high performance routing regardless of the traffic patterns. In addition, the NetIron MLX Series and NetIron XMR Series offer wire-speed, hardware-based unicast reverse path forwarding checks to thwart spoof attacks on the network infrastructure or the end subscribers.

FDR is effectively complemented by Foundry’s hardware based ACLs and PBR built into many of the packet processors powering the various Foundry products. This offers ISPs a higher degree of control over traffic traversing their network for implementing strict routing policies or filtering malicious traffic – as in the case of a DDoS attack on a subscriber – without compromising routing performance for other types of traffic.

With IPv6 gaining popularity and increasing demand each day, Foundry offers ISPs dual stack IPv4/IPv6 routing on many platforms including the BigIron RX Series switches, NetIron MLX Series routers, and the high end NetIron XMR backbone routers. The dual stack functionality enables ISPs to mix IPv4 and IPv6 routing on the same physical interfaces, allowing ISPs to turn on IPv6 as needed without any performance sacrifice or additional cost. A rich set of IPv6 routing protocols enables both unicast and multicast IPv6 routing. Supported routing protocols include RIPng, OSPFv3, IS-IS for IPv6, BGP4+, MLDv1 and MLDv2, and PIM-SSM.

Many ISPs and IXPs observe aggressively increasing Internet traffic loads that necessitate careful trend analysis and capacity planning to avoid future performance bottle necks. Using the sFlow technology (RFC 3176) supported across Foundry’s product lines, ISPs can effectively gain real time visibility into traffic loads, and traffic composition, allowing for better capacity planning, as well as troubleshooting in case of a network problem or a DDoS attack. sFlow offers ISPs a scalable distributed mechanism – built into Foundry’s packet processors – that is far better suited for high speed interfaces than alternative solutions, and is far less demanding in terms of CPU loads and resource consumption on the ISP routers.

Multi-media plays a very important role in the lives of consumers and corporations have to design networks that are optimized for the distribution of multi-media content. Multi-media content distribution networks (CDN) require the network infrastructure to locate a server that is “close” to the subscriber. CDNs have been experiencing accelerating growth rates that require the use of very high density routers along with massive peering scalability in order to ensure the requisite geographical reach. The very high density of 10-GbE interfaces on the NetIron XMR routers, their low latency architecture, and massive scalability allow peering with a very large number of service providers, thereby optimizing reachability and the overall end user experience. As more firms rely on CDNs to increase the speed and quality of experience, it is critical for CDNs to provide very high reliability and uncompromised, wire-speed performance. The NetIron XMR routers are purpose-built for enabling such applications.

ISP networks often require a compact router for routing within the ISP’s domain. Both the NetIron CES 2000 Series and the FastIron Edge X (FES-X) Series offer advanced routing capabilities to meet such needs. Additionally, the FastIron Edge XE (FES-XE) Series boasts the industry's leading IPv4 and IPv6 hardware routing capacity in a compact routing switch. This

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broad range of offerings allows ISPs to choose the product that most closely matches their needs.

IPTV Services for Telco Operators

The increasing interest in offering IPTV requires service providers to build aggregation networks that can offer multiple services on their network. The BigIron RX Series, NetIron MLX Series, NetIron CES 2000 Series and FastIron Edge X (FESX) Series are ideal products for providers who intend to deliver IPTV over their network. As the popularity of value-added IPTV services such as Network Personal Video Recorder (Network PVR) and Video On Demand (VoD) soars, service providers need to future-proof their network to be 10-GbE ready near the access nodes and capable of scalable speeds beyond 10-GbE in the aggregation and backbone layers. All of the above offerings from Foundry have 10-GbE interface support along with wire-speed performance, and the ability to form multi-port, multi-slot trunks over multiple GbE ports to go above 10-GbE speeds.

The NetIron CES 2000 Series and FastIron Edge X Series (FESX) switches are advanced Layer 2/3 switches with several security features and powerful multicast capabilities such as IGMP v3 and

Access node (PON OLT, DSLAM)

SHE for national content insertion

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RHE: Regional Head End SHE: Super Head End

RHE Media Server Farm POP Access Ring BRAS POP BRAS Aggregation Ring Access Ring Aggregation Ring

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fast leave support. These platforms are ideal when the aggregation switch needs to be located close to the access devices such as DSLAMs. The compact form factor of these platforms makes them ideally suited for being collocated with a broadband access node. In addition, 100Base-FX capable interfaces makes these platforms suitable as access platforms for delivery of high-speed video services to subscribers. The NetIron CES 2000 has up to 48 ports of 1-GbE Fiber and 2 ports of 10-GbE in a compact 1 RU platform. Its high touch processing capabilities such as Provider Backbone Bridging and Provider Bridging makes it an ideal candidate for efficient and scalable FTTx deployments with rich multicast-based services.

The BigIron RX has advanced Layer 2 and Layer 3 capabilities and offers the flexibility of 4 chassis-based form factors. The NetIron MLX is suitable for providers offering IPTV services on a multi-service, MPLS-enabled infrastructure, or for high scalability aggregation networks. The low-latency, and advanced QoS system architecture of these platforms, along with wire-speed performance make them ideal for deployment of bandwidth-intensive differentiated services that are required in triple-play networks. The BigIron RX and NetIron MLX platforms are also very well suited for use in head-end applications at regional or national video hub offices, and video serving offices for fast, low-latency interconnect among high-density media servers, middleware servers, digital rights management servers, and encoders.

The BigIron RX Series and the NetIron MLX Series of products are the only platforms in the industry with an ideal fit for IPTV applications by providing massive terabit capacity with 100 Gbps full duplex per full slot and native hardware-based IPv6 routing. This unique combination provides phenomenal protection on investment for the service provider in face of increasing capacity needs and emerging technologies.

VoIP Telephony

Service providers planning to deploy Voice over IP (VoIP) solutions require a carrier-class platform to provide interconnectivity among VoIP components in the packet network such as a SoftSwitch, SS7 signaling gateway, and a media gateway. The NetIron MLX Series is a high availability platform that is ideal for such requirements. Its advanced Virtual Output Queuing (VOQ) capabilities, purpose-built high availability architecture, and Clos fabric architecture allows deterministic, low latency, and wire-speed performance to be achieved on a highly scalable platform.

Virtual Output Queuing on the NetIron MLX Series allows distinct queues to be maintained for every output port on an input module’s traffic manager. This distributed buffering architecture along with advanced capabilities, such as selective traffic reprioritization/remarking and traffic policing, allows lower priority traffic to be buffered and classified into low-priority queues while high-priority voice conversation traffic can be serviced with minimal latency and jitter.

Regulations in many countries makes it mandatory for the provider offering VoIP service to also have the ability to perform lawful intercept of conversations between two parties. The NetIron MLX Series supports the optional use of ACL-based traffic mirroring. Using this capability, a Layer 4 ACL can be set up on any port of the NetIron MLX to support the functionality required under such emerging regulations such as the U.S. Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA).

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Cable and Multi-Service Operators (MSOs)

In order to reduce CapEx, simplify network architecture, and offer more flexible scalable triple play services, many Cable and MSO operators consider IP and Ethernet as the logical answers to providing next generation transport for their services.

Foundry’s rich set of routing and switching platforms allow Cable and MSO operators to achieve their goals while optimizing CapEx and OpEx. All Foundry platforms ranging from stackables to high end routers have been designed for low latency and low jitter1_{. This allows such service} providers to easily meet the stringent requirements for reliable delivery of video and voice services.

With hardware based unicast and multicast routing built into the Foundry platforms, together with a rich set of routing protocols, MSOs have a highly flexible solution for delivering multicast-based services like broadcast TV, as well as unicast-multicast-based services like video on demand, VoIP, and Internet access.

The increasing interest in HDTV from both Cable operators and their subscribers places a new requirement on the underlying infrastructure, namely, increasing the required bandwidth by a factor of 5 or 6. Ten gigabit Ethernet offers an elegant and attractive solution to this problem by offering the capacity to carry well over the typical 250 TV channels in HDTV format while retaining large headroom to support other services like VoIP and/or data. With 10-GbE supported

1 _{Obtainable latency and jitter are dependent on product used, packet size, and interface speed.}

PSTN Headend Routers Regional Hub Routers VoIP PBX HFC Gigabit Ethernet 10 Gigabit Ethernet Internet Broadcast Servers VoD Servers NI XMR 16000 QAM QAM CMTS QAM QAM CMTS NI XMR 8000 NI XMR 4000 FESX424 NID Cable Modem + VoIP

NID Cable Modem + VoIP

NI CES 2000

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across the entire product range, Foundry offers Cable and MSO operators an ideal solution for addressing their growing bandwidth needs. Should the need for higher bandwidth arise to scale services or to support increased content distribution between the headend and the regional hubs, Foundry offers the ability to create multi-10GbE trunk groups allowing the bandwidth of a single logical link to be scaled up to 80 Gbps.

Mixing multiple services over one common infrastructure delivers significant cost benefits; yet, it is very important to meet subscriber expectations for quality and reliability that have been set by traditional cable TV and telephony services. In order to meet those expectations MSOs need to adopt a two prong approach

• Utilize advanced QoS techniques to ensure smooth and reliable delivery of each type of service offered. Foundry’s platforms provide advanced traffic priority marking, rate limiting and traffic policing, and tunable traffic scheduling to meet this requirement.

• Adopt high availability platforms supporting rapid convergence protocols to reduce down time, and raise overall service availability. Foundry offers MSOs many high availability features that span many of its routing and switching products. Starting at the stackable level with the NetIron CES 2000 Series or FastIron Edge X-Series platforms that offer redundant power supplies, all the way to the high end NetIron XMR routers featuring redundant management modules with hitless failover and software upgrades1_{, redundant switch fabrics,} and redundant power supplies and cooling. The unique combination of high availability features on the NetIron XMR Series, NetIron MLX Series, and BigIron RX Series makes them perfect candidates for headend and regional hub applications.

Many Cable and MSO operators are likely to continue to utilize their existing Hybrid Fiber Coax infrastructure for service delivery to the subscriber. This would mandate the use of large numbers of QAM, CMTS, and the emerging DMTS devices to support this type of delivery while being capable of interfacing with the operator’s Ethernet + IP backbone. Foundry’s chassis-based NetIron XMR and MLX Series routers offer industry leading port density allowing up to 640 Gigabit Ethernet ports in a single chassis to enable effective traffic distribution to high numbers of QAM/CMTS/DMTS devices, while keeping the infrastructure operationally simple and manageable. In addition, the BigIron RX Series switches allow up to 1,536 Gigabit Ethernet ports to be aggregated in a single chassis.

As Cable and MSO Service Providers move towards IP based service delivery, it is anticipated that the increasing demand for millions of IP addresses may only be addressed using the abundant IPv6 address space. Foundry’s router platforms with dual stack IPv4/IPv6 support for both unicast and multicast, allow MSOs to acquire large IPv6 address blocks and utilize those over the same infrastructure used for IPv4. This native dual stack capability eliminates any potential bottle necks that may, otherwise, impede the growth of the Service Provider in the future.

For aggregation of CMTS systems with a compact edge switch, Foundry offers the NetIron CES 2000 Series—a compact 1 RU edge/aggregation switch with advanced capabilities such as Provider Bridging and Provider Backbone Bridging and 10-GbE uplinks.

The NetIron XMR, MLX and CES 2000 Series are all built for compliance with MEF 9 and MEF 14 specifications for delivery of advanced Carrier Ethernet services to commercial customers.

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Carrier’s Carrier Long-Haul Backbones

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Carrier’s Carrier IP Backbone

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The high BGP scalability of the NetIron XMR Series routers makes them a perfect fit for carriers offering IP transport to a large number of other IP carriers. For such applications the backbone edge router is required to maintain a large number of peering sessions with client ISP routers, a large number of BGP routes in its BGP Routing Information Base (RIB), as well as – in some cases – hundreds of thousands of non-aggregated routes in its Forwarding Information Base (FIB) in hardware. By design, the NetIron XMR routers are capable of effectively addressing such scenarios offering carrier’s carriers ample room for growth on a single chassis up to 2000 BGP peers, 10 Million BGP routes, and 1 Million IPv4 routes in hardware.

Leveraging Foundry Direct Routing (FDR), the NetIron XMR Series offers high performance, secure, robust routing that is completely hardware driven ensuring wire-speed performance and low latency.

Support for both Carrier Ethernet with speeds up to 10-GbE and Packet over SONET (POS) with speeds up to OC-192 (STM-64) offers operators the ability to continue leveraging existing backbone POS links while reaping the benefits of the cost effective Ethernet.

For transporting the traffic over long distances, the NetIron XMR Series optics offer distances up to 150km for 1-GbE, 80km for 10-GbE, and 80km for POS. In addition, the NetIron XMR Series supports IEEE-compliant 10-GbE WAN PHY to provide cost effective, OC-192/STM-64 compatible 10-GbE transport over existing SONET/SDH infrastructures up to thousands of kilometers.

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Internet Data Centers (IDCs)

Data Center Boundary Internet Internet SI 450 FES X NI XMR 8000 BI RX-16

Foundry’s Internet Data Center solution covers the data center needs from layer 2 to layer 7. At the heart of the solution is Foundry’s high performance router and switch platforms like the BigIron RX Series switches, and the NetIron MLX Series routers. These platforms offer the high port density required in data center environments for server and backbone connectivity. At the high end, the BigIron RX-32 offers up to 1,536 1-GbE ports or 128 10-GbE in a single system. The NetIron MLX Series offers advanced routing services up to 640 1-GbE ports or 128 10-GbE in a single system1_.

Data center servers may be connected directly to Foundry’s high density BigIron RX routing switches or NetIron MLX routers above, or through FastIron Edge X-series (FES X) switches for traffic and cable grooming before feeding into the high density switches/routers. The FES X-series switches enable this scenario without compromising performance due to their native 10-GbE uplink support. For high-end data center applications requiring high-touch processing and deep buffering in a top-of-the-rack switch, Foundry offers the compact 1 RU NetIron CES 2000 Series of Layer 3 switches. The NetIron CES 2000 also features front-to-back airflow that is important in densely packed data center environments.

For high security data centers, the NetIron MLX Series offers Multi-VRF routing, whereby multiple secure routing domains can be deployed. Multi-VRF uses multiple instances of a routing protocol such as BGP or OSPF to exchange routing information across each routing domain instance. It is ideal for such applications where isolation of traffic among different servers is required, for enforcing strict server access policies, while avoiding the complexity of MPLS-based VPNs.

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The ServerIron family of layer 4-7 switches integrates into this infrastructure to provide intelligent, high performance server load balancing using a multitude of configurable parameters. Hardware based rate limiting can be deployed on any of the above platforms to enforce SLA contracted bandwidth without any impact on performance.

For Internet Data Center connectivity to ISPs providing transport, the NetIron XMR Series routers provide an ideal fit of flexible form factor, performance, and very high scalability. A NetIron XMR router with the capacity for up to hundreds of BGP peers and millions of BGP routes easily allows for peering with multiple ISPs to achieve load distribution, resiliency, and optimizing reach to the end user.

FDR routing technology available on the BigIron RX Series, NetIron MLX Series, and the NetIron XMR Series provides the robust high performance routing that is mission critical in such environments. The large route capacity on the interface modules of these platforms allows the entire Internet route table to be pre-programmed on a single interface module, thereby allowing unparalleled performance. Wire-speed inbound and outbound ACLs, and Policy Based Routing (PBR) provides data center operators with granular control for addressing security needs and/or controlling access to servers/services.

Internet eXchange Points (IXPs)

MRP Multi-10GbE Core ISP 6 ISP 5 ISP 4 ISP 2 ISP 3 ISP 1 Customer 1 Customer 2 Customer 3 Customer 4 Customer 5 Edge BI RX-16 BI RX-8 VSRP VSRP VSRP VSRP _{FI SuperX}

Accelerated growth of Internet traffic loads constantly places IXPs under heavy pressure. Being the traffic carrier that interconnects ISPs and subscribers, an IXP’s port and bandwidth capacity is crucial for maintaining and growing their customer base.

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Foundry offers IXPs a range of products with a variety of interface offerings as well as scalable bandwidth. For IXP-ISP connectivity, 1-GbE and 10-GbE have proven to be cost efficient ideal connections that are in high demand by ISPs today. The BigIron RX Series switches feature the industry’s highest 10-GbE port density (128 10-GbE per system) with wire-speed performance, and are ideal solutions for connectivity to a large number of ISPs. For end subscriber connectivity, Foundry offers interface speeds ranging from 10/100 Ethernet to 1-GbE combined with a variety of optics offering up to 150 km reach for 1-GbE. The FastIron Super X switches, and BigIron RX-4/-8/-16 switches are ideal candidates for this connectivity scenario.

To address the constant demand for bandwidth in the IXP space, the BigIron RX Series offers scalable 10-GbE connectivity up to 80 Gbps per trunked link for the creation of very high capacity IXP cores, thereby allowing IXPs to support the rapidly growing volume of Internet traffic.

Being layer 2 transport providers, IXPs gain significant benefits by deploying Foundry’s advanced layer 2 solutions. Foundry’s products feature a rich and mature set of high end layer 2 capabilities. This includes IEEE 802.1w, Metro Ring Protocol (MRP) for ring configurations, and Virtual Switch Redundancy Protocol (VSRP) for dual homed configurations. This new breed of rapid convergence protocols provide IXPs with sub-second convergence in case of a link or switch failure.

Complementary to rapid convergence protocols, the BigIron RX Series offers advanced system resiliency via redundant management, layer 2 hitless failover and layer 2 hitless software upgrades, redundant power supplies, redundant cooling, and redundant switch fabric. Using this advanced combination of hardware, software, and protocol resiliency, IXPs can significantly improve service availability, thereby, improving customer retention, as well as attracting new customers.

Using Foundry’s unique layer 2 ACLs, IXPs can admit/filter traffic based on MAC address pattern matching and VLAN information to avoid leakage of undesirable packets into their networks in case of customer device misconfigurations. Examples of such undesirable traffic include certain vendor proprietary protocols or aggressive multicast-based protocols that are usually contractually banned from entering the IXP’s network.

In order to achieve a higher degree of service transparency, IXPs can offer transport of STP/RSTP (IEEE 802.1w) protocol using Foundry’s SuperSpan. SuperSpan provides complete isolation of the IXP domain from the customer domain by providing transparent tunneling of BPDUs across the IXP network. In addition, Super Aggregated VLANs may be used to offer a service where the participating parties are in complete charge of their own VLAN ID allocation and usage.

To enforce SLAs, the BigIron RX and FastIron Super X switches offer multiple traffic policing / rate limiting classes to provide granular traffic rate control as needed. These include port-based, VLAN-based, and layer 2 ACL-based rate classes1_{. In addition, using sFlow for layer 2-7 traffic} monitoring, IXPs can ensure that SLA requirements are met, as well as gain valuable insights into any traffic anomalies within their network.

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Summary

Foundry Networks offers a complete suite of solutions for different types of service providers and services including metro service providers, IPv4/IPv6 Internet routing, IPTV, VoIP, cable/MSO operators, carrier’s carriers, IDCs, and IXPs. Foundry’s solutions are marked by advanced routing and switching features, and wire-speed performance to enable the secure delivery of QoS-aware mass-market and business-market services. Built on future-proof architectures, Foundry’s high performance products are supplemented with the requisite advanced functionality required by each category of service provider. As the leader in performance and innovation, Foundry offers scalable, purpose-built solutions for each category to help service providers conserve capital and operating expenditures, while maximizing the value they can provide to their customers.

Although Foundry has attempted to provide accurate information in these materials, Foundry assumes no legal responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of the information. More specific information is available on request from Foundry. Please note that Foundry's product information does not constitute or contain any guarantee, warranty or legally binding representation, unless expressly identified as such in a duly signed writing.

©2007 Foundry Networks, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Foundry Networks, BigIron, NetIron, IronShield, IronView, IronWare, JetCore, JetScope, MetroLink, Terathon, TrafficWorks, Power of Performance and the ‘Iron’ family of marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Foundry Networks, Inc. in the United States and other countries. sFlow is a registered trademark of InMon Corporation. All others are trademarks of their respective owners.

Foundry Networks, Inc. Corporate Headquarters 4980 Great America Parkway Santa Clara, CA 95054

U.S. and Canada Toll-free: 1-888-TURBOLAN (887-2652) Direct telephone: +1 408.207.1700

Fax: +1 408.207.1709 Email: [email protected] www.foundrynetworks.com